Slashdot Mirror
An Open Alternative To Kickstarter
angry tapir writes "Crowd-funding website Crowdtilt officially launched last week, expanding upon the collective fundraising model pioneered by Kickstarter to enable raising money for any project — even a beer blitz. Like Kickstarter, Crowdtilt allows users to create a fundraising campaign with a tipping point. If the effort falls short of the set amount, would-be donors are not charged. However, unlike Kickstarter, the platform allows users to "group fund anything." Users can initiate campaigns without first getting the approval of service administrators, which they must do on Kickstarter."
I'm going to start a fundraising campaign to assassinate every world leader.
In other news: Crowdtilt was just shut down.
Spam ahoy!
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
That might not be a good idea. It could become overrun by scammers early on. The idealistic "libertarian" approach might work (overtime, scammers will be recognizeable as scammers by donors more easily) but by that time the site might be discredited as a haven for scammers by the majority of would-be donors
I wouldn't worry so much about spam, but rather about frivolous projects.
To see what other models are like, go check out...
http://www.indiegogo.com/
http://rockethub.com/
http://www.pozible.com/
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/
http://invested.in/
http://fundry.com/
http://pledgie.com/
http://www.sponsume.com/
http://peerbackers.com/
Then after you're doing reading through the hundreds of projects that amount to little more than "give me money because... well, just because.", you'll probably be glad that KickStarter does some, albeit a very superficial, checking of projects.
Yes, KickStarter has its own problem projects that make it through the review process.. projektor (probably a scam), juicies (unrealistic funding vs rewards leading to a kid way in over his head), Googly Eyes (essentially selling an existing product for a premium).
But they do try, and they explicitly disallow 'good cause' type projects, which are often the "just give me money" type projects.
Nothing against 'good cause' projects when they really are for a good cause - people who need a prosthesis but can't afford one.. more power to then. But then there's the "I want to go on a trip to Europe"-types.
I'd be more afraid of that sort of thing hitting crowdtilt, than spam hitting it.
Also, for those who want a truly open alternative, set up a Wordpress site and go check out:
http://ignitiondeck.com/id/wordpress-crowdfunding/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/crowd-funding/
As a non-American the thing that really annoys me about kickstarter is that its only for projects in the US. Does anyone know if this one will be any different?
Kickstopper is what we really need. Thwart some bad ideas.
I wish they'd improve on the way Kickstarter organizes the projects. I tried one a year ago and after two days my linked web site hadn't received a single hit. I wanted to wait a couple of days as an experiment to see what traffic Kickstarter itself generated before I started driving traffic myself. I checked the Kickstarter web site and I couldn't find my own project. I finally found it buried half a dozen pages deep in this generic new projects section and no where else. Basically it took some real digging to find it. The site is organized like iTunes. The favored projects get fronted and everything is buried with no hope of getting funded. I found it annoying since all they were contributing was hosting for their cut and if anything they were working against the vast majority of projects so they could focus funding sources for favored ones. After two days I halted the project and never tried again. The point is unless you personally can drive enough traffic to your project it has no chance and 90% of more of the projects posted are never given a fair chance. All they are providing you with is the structure and nothing else. I thought the site was there to promote projects but it's not it's there to promote projects that they think have a chance of getting funded or that the people behind the site like. There seemed no rhyme or reason behind the selections because most were obviously popular but some never received any pledges yet they were deemed worthy of a named section. If a section says film or books it should contain ALL of the film or book projects not just the darling projects. Most won't bother to look past the named sections because they would assume that's all there is and why wouldn't they?
It's a good idea but like all things in life the insiders get the breaks and the deck is stacked against everyone else. Maybe this new site will do a better job and not become a source for the "in crowd" like Kickstarter turned into.
Sorry, that's just a bad idea.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/5/23/
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Hey guys - glad to see our site's launch made it on here!
It was also awesome to see IDG pick up our TechCrunch story/ and press release, but the title of the article is pretty misleading (as well as the first few paragraphs). All press is good press for a young startup (gives us a LOT of feedback early on as we continue to build out our site/service), however the story seems to imply that this is for Kickstarter type projects... The language, both in our press release and our site, is actually explicitly different from Kickstarter's.
So just to clarify a few things for those that have asked questions: :"Users can initiate campaigns without first getting the approval of service administrators, which they must do on Kickstarter." -- Users can start campaigns without a wall set up by us, but we do look over campaigns, and use a few other Y-Combinator backed companies for fraud prevention and identification upon starting a campaign and disbursement of funds (as well as the several measures taken by our secure payment processor PoundPay).
-Crowdtilt is more of a "Kickstarter for groups of friends" (where instead of a $30,000 project, your group of friends funds a $1,200 party bus or bachelor party or wedding gift).
-It is for pooling money together, where instead of crowdfunding (many-to-one funding), it is more of a genre we call groupfunding (funded by the group, for the group)... I actually posted why we stuck with the name Crowdtilt over the other domain we own Grouptilt on Quora if anyone is interested.
-The author made a bit of a misleading statement, where he said
-The campaigns that use it for grandiose individual fundraising haven't done so well in our testing (it's not very likely for people on the internet to just fund an objective without having a clear connection to it).
Any other questions, feel free to check our FAQs or reach out to us using our Live Chat or help client. Hope this answers a few.
Thanks for posting the link to us!! Pretty huge day for something we've created (with tender, loving care) to make it on Slashdot!!
James // Khaled
crowdtilt
Wanna kick ass on RIAA? Set up a kick starter for legal battles or political lobbying,
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Then start one in your country. Simple. There are a myriad of reasons a company like this is limited to the United States, including tax reasons and scam reasons. If you don't like that brand of smoke, roll-your-own. Isn't that what the open source community is supposed to be about?
Silence is a state of mime.
And fund it using crowdtilt!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."